When does flirting go too far? In a changing world, can we agree on what is acceptable behaviour? Sexual harassment is much in the news, new laws and codes are in place. Legal definitions are one thing, but real life situations can be a lot messier and more uncertain. Mixing expert analysis of the issues with discussion of everyday scenarios, Jo Fidgen asks: what are the new rules of relationships?
3 November 2017
Nautilus Magazine: Ideology Is the Original Augmented Reality (by Slavoj Žižek)
And does not something similar happen in Pokémon Go? To simplify things to the utmost, did Hitler not offer the Germans the fantasy frame of Nazi ideology that made them see a specific Pokémon—“the Jew”—popping up all around, and providing the clue to what one has to fight against? And does the same not hold for all other ideological pseudo-entities that have to be added to reality in order to make it complete and meaningful? One can easily imagine a contemporary anti-immigrant version of Pokémon Go where the player wanders about a German city and is threatened by Muslim immigrant rapists or thieves lurking everywhere. Here we encounter the crucial question: Is the form the same in all these cases, or is the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory which makes us see the Jewish plot as the source of our troubles formally different from the Marxist approach which observes social life as a battleground of economic and power struggles? There is a clear difference between these two cases: In the second case, the “secret” beneath all the confusion of social life is social antagonisms, not individual agents which can be personalized (in the guise of Pokémon figures), while Pokémon Go does inherently tend toward the ideologically personalized perception of social antagonisms. In the case of bankers threatening us from all around, it is not hard to see how such a figure can easily be appropriated by a Fascist populist ideology of plutocracy (as opposed to “honest” productive capitalists). … The point of the parallel between Nazi anti-Semitism and Pokémon Go is thus a very simple and elementary one: Although Pokémon Go presents itself as something new, grounded in the latest technology, it relies on old ideological mechanisms. Ideology is the practice of augmenting reality. [...]
“First-person operationalism” thus emphasizes how, even in our “direct (self-)experience,” there is a gap between content (the narrative inscribed into our memory) and the “operational” level of how the subject constructed this content, where we always have a series of rewritings and tinkerings: “introspection provides us—the subject as well as the ‘outside’ experimenter—only with the content of representation, not with the features of the representational medium itself.”3 In this precise sense, the subject is his own fiction: The content of his own self-experience is a narrativization in which memory traces already intervene. So when Dennett makes “ ‘writing it down’ in memory criterial for consciousness; that is what it is for the ‘given’ to be ‘taken’—to be taken one way rather than another,” and claims that “there is no reality of conscious experience independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and, hence, on memory),”3 we should be careful not to miss the point: What counts for the concerned subject himself is the way an event is “written down,” memorized—memory is constitutive of my “direct experience” itself, i.e., “direct experience” is what I memorize as my direct experience. Or, to put it in Hegelian terms (which would undoubtedly appall Dennett): Immediacy itself is mediated, it is a product of the mediation of traces. One can also put this in terms of the relationship between direct experience and judgment on it: Dennett’s point is that there is no “direct experience” prior to judgment, i.e., what I (re)construct (write down) as my experience is already supported by judgmental decisions. [...]
It is crucial to note that the patient “wasn’t ‘consciously’ confabulating”: “The connection between the chicken claw and the shovel was an honest expression of what ‘he’ thought.”5 And is not ideology, at its most elementary, such an interpreter confabulating rationalizations in the conditions of repression? A somewhat simplified example: Let’s imagine the same experiment with two pictures shown to a subject fully immersed in ideology, a beautiful villa and a group of starving miserable workers; from the accompanying cards, he selects a fat rich man (inhabiting the villa) and a group of aggressive policemen (whose task is to squash the workers’ eventual desperate protest). His “left brain interpreter” doesn’t see the striking workers, so how does it account for the aggressive policemen? By confabulating a link such as: “Policemen are needed to protect the villa with the rich man from robbers who break the law.” Were not the (in)famous nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that justified the United States’ attack on Iraq precisely the result of such a confabulation, which had to fill in the void of the true reasons for the attack?
The Atlantic: A Contested Finding in a Major New Climate-Change Report
Some of its techniques may have significant weaknesses. The Lancet report makes an eye-popping assertion about the global economy, arguing that climate change has already significantly harmed labor capacity around the world. Between 2015 and 2016—which are the second- and first-hottest years ever recorded—it argues that “outdoor-labor capacity” fell by 2 percent. Since the year 2000, outdoor-labor capacity has fallen by 5.3 percent overall, it claims. [...]
Climate change will almost certainly harm global labor output, but a lack of empirical observations around the world makes the kind of measurement The Lancet is attempting difficult. The controversy points to one of the most difficult aspects of finding climate change’s effects on human life: While scientists can measure weather worldwide, measuring the fingerprint of climate change on all human activity is far more complicated.
The Lancet report makes other broad claims about global public health that were more widely accepted. It finds that many more older people experience heat waves now than did two or three decades ago. The report says that roughly 175 million more people older than 65 worldwide were exposed to excess heat in 2015 as compared to several decades ago. On average, 125 million more older adults are exposed to heat than were in previous decades. [...]
The European heat wave of 2003, one of the worst natural disasters ever experienced, is estimated to have ultimately killed more than 70,000 people.
Bloomberg: Patient Deaths Show Darker Side of Modernized Chinese Medicine
What killed Wu was later described in an autopsy report as a "drug allergy." But doctors couldn’t pinpoint what he was allergic to because the shots he was given contained dozens, if not hundreds, of different compounds extracted from two herbs. [...]
Chinese medicine injections generated sales of $13 billion last year, according to the research firm Forward Industries Institute. Listed companies worth billions of dollars have thrived, benefiting major global funds like those managed by Schroders Plc., UBS Group AG and Skagen AS that hold their stocks.
Yet, the industry’s ascent has also raised public health concerns. Over a hundred injections based on traditional recipes are sold in China these days, some without stringent human trials. Doctors often prescribe them in an array of untested combinations. Adverse reactions, from skin rashes to fatalities like Wu’s, doubled to about 133,000 last year from 2011, according to government data. [...]
Still, due to the history of lax regulation, many injectables based on Chinese medicine haven’t been evaluated in strict scientific clinical trials. That means the reactions they set off in the body aren’t fully known. Chinese medicine is based on centuries of practical experience. But it is traditionally taken orally, which gives the digestive system a chance to shield patients from harmful chemicals. Injecting the concoctions into the bloodstream can heighten side effects.
Vox: We're becoming numb to terrorism. That might be a good thing.
Their argument is that terror attacks, particularly since 9/11, have become both more frequent and less organized. Instead of big, spectacular events, we’ve seen a string of attacks across the West that were carried out by lone individuals with few resources, little training, and hardly any planning. The attack in New York City this week is a prime example: A 29-year-old man drives a rented truck into a crowded bike path, killing eight people, and then flees with pellet and paintball guns in hand.
According to Amarasingam and Clarke, these sorts of low-level attacks have become so common that people are growing numb to them. As a result, the “once-shocking violence becomes normalized” and citizens stop responding with the panic and outrage that were once their reactions. [...]
Exactly. And I’ll add that this is actually a good thing in some ways. If terrorism is normalized for people, both jihadist and far-right violence, they are less likely, maybe, to support crazy laws that impact their civil liberties and the rights of others. It’s only when you introduce a sudden sense of fear, one that people don’t understand, that they become kind of irrationally protectionist. So in a way normalizing terrorism is good. [...]
I think the victims of terrorism never really forget. The families of those killed and those who are injured will have to deal with the aftermath of any attack for a long time. And I think for some terrorist groups, the mere act of revenge is maybe enough. They know they will never fully defeat a country like the United States, but as long as they show that there is a push back, that they aren’t just taking American foreign policy decisions lying down, then that is enough. They also communicate that internally to members.
Vox: How cosmic rays revealed a new, mysterious void inside the Great Pyramid
Today, the journal Nature has published a finding that sounds like the setup to a Nicolas Cage movie. A team of physicists and engineers has discovered a previously unknown “void” in the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt. And they did it with the help of cosmic rays created at the edge of space.
The “ScanPyramids Big Void,” as scientists are calling it, is around 98 feet long and about 50 feet high. The investigators don’t know what’s inside this void or what its purpose is. Nor do they have any way to currently access it. [...]
Khufu wasn’t just a king — he was thought to be a god. And so his death commanded something spectacular. At 455 feet, his pyramid stood as the world’s tallest man-made building until the year 1300. That’s 3,800 years. The pyramid was about as old to the ancient Romans as the Romans are to us. And throughout the rise and fall of civilizations, the pyramids have remained a fascination. Even today, they still contain mysteries — like the newly identified void. [...]
The Great Pyramid is a wonder of the ancient world built around 2400 BC; experts still don’t know exactly how it was constructed. The void is completely sealed off from the known passageways in the pyramid. There’s no way to currently get to it. And so Nature’s finding opens more questions than it provides answers.
Quartz: Britain’s improving gender gap has nothing to do with wages or promotions
Britain is one of most improved countries for closing the gender gap, according to the World Economic Forum. But data shows that this improvement has nothing to do with tangible improvements in either salaries or getting more women into leadership. Here are the most-improved countries in closing the overall gap: [...]
Yet when it comes to getting more women in the workforce, paying them the same as men, or having more females in leadership roles, the UK is still stalling at 53rd in the Economic Participation and Opportunity pillar.
When it comes to wages alone, Britain ranks 95th worldwide. WEF points out that 57% of all work UK women do is unpaid (compared to 32% for men) and the mean monthly earnings of women is 66% that of men.
CityLab: 49 Countries Have Already Reached Peak Emissions
Let's start with the good news, since it’s so rare in climate coverage today. Rich and his co-author, Kelly Levin, reviewed historical emissions and found that the number of countries whose greenhouse gas emissions have already peaked is on the rise. In 1990, 19 countries had already peaked; by 2000, that number had risen to 33, and by 2010 it was 49—including France (which peaked back in 1991), the Netherlands (1996), Australia (2006), and the United States (2007). “Nearly all of the developed countries have already peaked. That's an encouraging trend,” Rich says. “People may not know that, based on the current rhetoric, but actually [U.S. emissions] did peak 10 years ago. We’ve made a lot of progress, and our economy has grown.” [...]
Still, the total number of countries that have peaked matters less than their share of global emissions. To illustrate: Between 1990 and 2000, the number of countries that peaked grew by 14, but their share of global emissions actually decreased—from 21 percent to 18 percent—over the same period. Sharper emissions cuts by some countries, especially powerhouse emitters, could offset slower peaks by others. By 2010, the 48 countries that had peaked were responsible for 36 percent of global emissions. The countries that have peaked could account for 40 percent of emissions by 2020, and 60 percent by 2030. [...]
Now for the bad news: All this progress is still probably not enough to limit warming to less than two degrees over pre-industrial levels. “The global picture is still not good,” Rich says. “Global emissions need to peak in 2020 for what's called the least-cost likely chance of meeting the two-degree global temperature target, and we're not on track for that.” Even if every nation meets all the commitments in its Paris Agreement pledges, global emissions are still expected to increase between 2020 and 2030. That doesn't necessarily mean that the goals of the Paris Agreement are totally out of reach, but it will be a lot harder—not to mention more expensive—to get there. Global emissions can peak later, but it means countries will have to decarbonize faster, and may have to rely on as-yet unproven carbon-capture technologies to limit global warming to safe levels.
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